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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26243203">Within Eight Rooms</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/the10oclockshop/pseuds/the10oclockshop'>the10oclockshop</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Handmaid's Tale (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst and Porn, F/F, Power Dynamics, Season/Series 02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 12:53:34</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>17,791</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26243203</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/the10oclockshop/pseuds/the10oclockshop</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Eight different rooms in the Waterford house all hold the same secret.</p><p> </p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>June Osborne | Offred/Serena Joy Waterford</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>45</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>89</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. the kitchen</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Set during the course of Season 2, in no particular order or perhaps they are in exact order. That's not for me to decide.<br/>PS: <i>That</i> scene in 2x10 didn't happen. You know the one. That is the only change I would make to canon for this particular story. Sorry. Don't know why my brain chose this scenario for a fanfic for these characters but it did! Gonna miss the Waterford house set :P</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>She’s sitting on the countertop, perched, rather like a particularly fat bird. Her ass, wherever it has been all day, is right where Rita prepares all the vegetables they eat for meals. And it’s not as if Offred is <em> fat</em>; she’s just pregnant, but all the same, how she managed to clamber her 6-month pregnant body onto such an elevated surface is something better left for Serena to ponder during her quiet days, when there is absolutely nothing else left to think about. In one hand, she has a glass of milk, half-empty and her hair is down. The other is idly picking at the fabric on her thigh. The thin white nightgown only works to remind Serena of the way it becomes sheer with a little sweat, and with her wet mouth moving over a hidden nipple underneath until its pink flush seeps through the cotton.</p><p>But right now? It’s just a regular gown, exactly the same as all Handmaids in the district are made to wear. Nothing special about her in the slightest. Sometimes, Serena is not even certain if Offred is particularly pretty, or if this dalliance has its roots more so in desperation rather than mutual attraction. In any other world, would Offred—<em>June</em> have ever caught her eye? Likely not, if Serena is completely honest with herself. She’d be another poorly-dressed Plain Jane going about her business just the same as every nondescript blonde woman. She’s insufferable, on top of everything else and maybe that’s what Serena dislikes the most.</p><p>Even right now, as she sips her insipid milk like a child, dangling her legs and swollen ankles off the floor. Impertinent. </p><p>She acts like she owns this house, and perhaps she does, in a way. Even if she’s in red and Serena is in blue and Fred in black. The color scheme doesn’t appear to hold any weight here any longer when it comes to her. It’s irritating.</p><p>Maybe Offred notices, because her head tilts as she takes a long swallow of her milk.</p><p>“You seem tense.”</p><p>Her flat voice is loud in the quiet kitchen at night, even though it is barely above a whisper. And the statement itself is so comically obvious that if Serena had the ability to laugh any longer, she may have actually done just that. She is banned from holding a pen. Her husband fucks another woman with clockwork regularity in front of her face. She must stay silent, always. So, has there been a moment since she lost the allowance to pick up a book, flick through its pages, and rapaciously devour its ideas that she <em>hasn’t</em> been tense?</p><p>Instead, she flinches a little at the sound. It feels sharp like an accusation, like 'tense' is something she shouldn’t be anymore, especially not now. Offred could be right, she supposes. If there is anywhere to relax, it’s around her. After all, how much more damage could possibly be done at this point? She’s had her face buried between the Handmaid’s thighs against everything she once held holy, writhed with desire, violently come apart at the seams as Offred had brought her well-beyond the prescribed boundaries of the relationship Gilead attempts to maintain. She’s cried, pulled hair, panted, and thrown herself at the feet of a woman that seems so nonchalant about that power she wields. And Serena <em> hates </em> how susceptible she is to the very same things everyone else is.</p><p>So when she thinks about being tense, Serena just wants to roll her eyes, summon her 15-year-old self, and say, “Duh!”</p><p>But her jaw sets even tighter, glaring at Offred. What she wouldn’t give to grab that glass of milk and smash it against the wall, splattering white everywhere, stepping on the shards, and instead gulping down half a bottle of Fred’s best whiskey to manage the hot slices of agony in her flesh. </p><p>“Come here.”</p><p>Taking commands from a fallen woman is worse than despicable, although it would not be the first time.</p><p>In the beginning, Offred’s demands came buried under other words, obscured as ego-massaging insinuations and guilt trips, making Serena falsely believe that she was making up her own mind about issues like babies and speaking up. Somewhere, sometime, the explicit instructions became loud, and easier to follow. Now, Serena flushes hotly recalling the sound of June’s voice, gravelly and strangled, gasping in her ear, “Inside me.” And how she knew that was precisely what Serena craved, making her feel ashamed for her own careless flagrancy of desire.</p><p>Even worse, though, that once: “Come for me, Serena.” </p><p>(And she had, too hard, too desperately, too shamefully.) </p><p>Heat rises in her blood, as incapable as she is to say no and deny Offred what she wants again.</p><p>The way her legs shift open wide enough for Serena to ease between them is such a familiar feeling by now. The glass clinks down on the countertop as two warm hands grip her shoulders, pushing, tugging, turning her around until she can only feel Offred at her back, the baby bump a gentle reminder against her spine. Her touch is light, pulling softly on the zipper of the blue dress, opening it just enough for Serena’s shoulders to cool in the night air of the darkened kitchen.</p><p>Massages have never been a pleasurable experience. She doesn’t like how manipulative the situation is, how painful, all those comments criticizing how much tension she holds in her muscles, how hard they are, the way it feels like a passive aggressive excuse to inflict pain on her under the guise of good health. All the petty little things that seem critical in retrospect but people claim are just casual observations about someone’s well-being. </p><p>Besides, Serena Waterford does not and has not ever liked to be touched, especially not by strangers. It’s too intimate, and she loathes the way a slightly too hard pinch can cause her whole body to wince, to cringe, to give in to their manipulations. Her weakness is too blatant when a nerve is triggered, and to her, it appears the entire purpose of massage is to pinch nerves she’d rather forget about entirely.</p><p>Fred was never even allowed this. Perhaps on some level, she hadn’t really trusted him with her body. (Not that she can truly trust Offred with that—or anything—either. But she <em>allows</em> it, which is a blurred line she repeatedly needs to draw.)</p><p>Somehow, when Offred does this however, when her fingers knead slowly, her knuckles dig in a little, it does feel good. Really <em> good</em>. Because she’s not flinching at all. If anything, it hurts slightly but June’s hands are certain, soft, and retain an instinctive knowledge of her body, of every knot and just how hard to push. Her neck rolls a little without her permission, and June draws in a steep, sharp breath in response, moving her fingers and thumbs more purposefully along Serena’s nape.</p><p>It’s slow, patient work which is partly why Serena’s so impressed that Offred has any skill at this in the least. Lethargy is hardly a particularly unknown aspect of Offred’s personality, as she may be the slowest human being on earth, but patience has never been one of her more obvious traits. </p><p>It’s undignified how her body sags just that little bit against the cabinets. She loathes that a singular, boring, irritating, petulant brat of a woman retains this sort of obtuse power with merely her fingers. And they’re not even naked.</p><p>When it’s just sex, Serena can lie. Blithely, really. There is no sport quite as challenging and satisfying as embroiling herself (and everyone she knows) in lies of her own making. It’s intoxicating in the right doses and after almost a lifetime of practice, she’s got it down to a science. Sex with Offred is about control, power, respite, or basic instinctual bodily necessities—like men claim to have when caught cheating or seeing prostitutes. In this world, of course it makes total sense for a Wife to wish to exert her minimal vestiges of control, in any way she pleases. It really doesn’t matter if most of the time it’s actually her on her knees, and Offred is the one reaping the most obvious benefits of the arrangement.</p><p>Once, perhaps, she would have recited prayer to cleanse her of the sins, but God no longer lingers in her periphery when <em>June</em> is near. He and his entire pantheon is gone altogether. An absentee father, just like her own. <em> Out of sight, out of mind </em> is what Serena tells herself when she should be feeling self pity and shame. Instead, she just avoids the truth, burrowing into falsehoods as if God won't find her there where He expects her to be.</p><p>It’s easy to lie to herself when she makes June come, with those hands ripping at her shoulders, fingers wrung tightly in Serena’s hair, panting shamelessly. It’s even easier when Serena doesn’t allow herself to be touched afterwards and skulks away to her own room, to finger herself into the same sort of release with no one else around. Offred isn’t allowed to know that part of things; she already knows too much and has taken advantage—only a few moments of weakness—and unleashed her own fury upon Serena’s body, leaving her a shriveled, trembling mess in the wake of the most intense climaxes of her life. </p><p>She loathes that.</p><p>So the lies come easily. (They must.) </p><p>Sex is the easy part, because even animals have needs. There is no guarantee of affection, or emotion, or even sense of connection at all. They fuck and they leave. Method. Reason. Biology. Simplicity at its finest, she thinks.</p><p>This—<em>whatever it is</em>—is harder to lie about, but certainly she can try. This is June’s hands tenderly working through the stubborn knots of her shoulders in a way nobody else has ever dared to do. This is her body giving into somebody else in a way it never has. This is a form of trust she’s never experienced. So, it must clearly just be about sex. Of course.</p><p>Somehow though, the lie doesn’t perform the way it should and Serena finds herself leaning into the touch more than is safe. One of her hands moves, slipping up a bare knee and planting itself firmly on June’s thigh, pushing the flimsy nightgown up. Suddenly, a waft of heat emerges, expectedly so. She knows too well what happens now, and the way her own body responds to those thighs bracketing her hips. Her throat goes dry momentarily each and every time she thinks of the contrast between soft skin and hard muscle, the tease, the power of such an normally unremarkable part of a woman's body. But for Serena, <em>underrated</em> is the only adjective that springs to mind as she presses her fingertips that little bit more into the plush pink.  </p><p>Once, one night, she’d let her imagination run away for a while, trying to picture June as a normal person, in a city like Boston used to be, during the hot summers. Jean shorts. A simple t-shirt. Hair loose, or maybe tucked into a messy ponytail.</p><p>It was such a taboo fantasy, and so far removed from what life has become that it actually felt pornographic to picture a 30-something-year-old woman in casual jean shorts and t-shirt walking down a city street in the sun. And it had turned her on to a repulsive degree because she saw bare legs, and those fucking thighs, and bare arms with the hint of toned muscle, a loose-fitting top that slid off one shoulder exposing the smooth skin, the jut of a artistically-shaped clavicle too. Nothing that 10 years ago would have been abnormal or irregular in the least. She’d come with that image in her head, biting down on her lip, and feeling like the worst, most debased of perverts. A lecher. Similar to—if not exactly like those men who fondle themselves in the park when a pretty woman jogs past in leggings. Whatever she has inside her to make her do such things feels as if it’s a demonic possession when she has such puerile fantasies.</p><p>She didn’t look at Offred the entire day after that. She simply couldn’t. Every time she heard the footsteps even come near, she’d yell at the Handmaid to return to her room.</p><p>Now her fingertips dig in a little harder and her entire chest tightens. Offred—<em>no</em>, <em>June</em> doesn’t appear to notice the same and her movements remain methodical and even.</p><p>Until she hits that one spot, somewhere around the edge of Serena’s shoulder blade that has been bothering her for months. A thumb presses and works the tendon and Serena can’t help herself, once again. And, undoubtedly, she resents her own body, but it doesn’t appear to mind being a traitor because, before she can’t attempt to stop it, a guttural, hungry, grateful moan hums forth. It is the sound of absolute pleasure. And it doesn’t stop immediately either, a few smaller ones follow immediately in its wake.</p><p>And that’s when June’s motions stall abruptly but her hands remain in place, clenching at hot skin.</p><p>“Oh God, Serena,” she whispers in response, keening a little, her legs closing tightly and trapping Serena’s waist between them so she can’t escape. “<em>Fuck</em>.”</p><p>It’s the first time Serena realizes that it’s not just the release of anger and tension with another warm body for her. Her arousal hasn’t always been the mere biological response to need and sexual touch in a world absent of such. She’s turned on by Serena very specifically, at least that's what Serena longs now to tell herself.</p><p>Her hand digs in even harder to that thigh, even as she’s frozen and too afraid to turn around, because now something is more real and a lie can’t actually cover it much longer. Maybe it’s to prove something to herself, or to attempt to force reality into a lie, but Serena does spin around faster than June expects, leans down and immediately seeks those hard nipples right under the cotton that have been on her mind since she saw Offred sitting there. Her greedy hands are seeking to prove herself wrong, to insist that<em> is </em> merely sex, not any sort of further connection. No intimacy because that straddles a much thinner, more delicate line that could easily break at any moment.</p><p>She braces her large hands on June’s soft thighs, working her mouth feverishly against fabric with one of June’s hands gripping the back of her neck as she does. Without warning, Serena pushes forward, hiking the dress up, tilting June's hips onto a more favorable angle under that pregnant swell, and sliding one finger tentatively into the damp tangle of dark blonde curls she knows is there, because she knows the scent better than anything now. June's commands are always spinning in her head, impelling both confidence and a seasoned lack of doubt. She partners that with a second finger.</p><p>This time June moans, abruptly choking the sound back into her chest so it doesn’t wake the household. She sounds almost like she’s gagging and it’s not very pleasant, like a crying, wild animal caught in a snare.</p><p>She’s slick, tight and ready, and Serena hates that her necessary fairy-tale no longer holds water; this isn’t merely sex. That massage was about something more, her reaction was something more. That trust was something much more and she hates herself for having that knowledge now.</p><p>So, she fucks June right there on the countertop to erase it, until the Handmaid comes hard, dripping onto the very wood where Rita chops their vegetables each day. </p><p>Serena is never going to be able to watch Rita do that ever again.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. the dining room</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>This isn’t even close to normal but that is the least of June’s concerns as she spears a potato with her fork, scraping the metal against the Waterford’s delicate Herend china with its pretty songbirds hiding under her very rudimentary meal of meat and potatoes. She snickers a little at the ornate crystal tumbler in front of her. 'Authentic Waterford Crystal' is etched into the glass. Ridiculous. Sure, it may not be as striking as the Baccarat vases that reside in the Putnam’s foyer, but these trivial luxury goods are still such an ostentatious eye sore, especially when filled with tepid cow’s milk. June can’t think of a much worse juxtaposition. </p><p>The Waterfords: frugality and frivolity in one nasty little package lacking any sense of cohesion at all. The scrape of her utensils is studiously ignored by the Commander, but Serena flinches, just a little, her eye twitching with the grating sound. June wants to try again. To watch the outward cringe with fascination over the power she holds. </p><p>Everything about this moment is jarring in its disparity, from the shifting, melodic trance of some classical music of the Commander’s choosing to his pointed commentary on the cor anglais in the piece, as if he’s gracing everyone with a forbidden treat, as if anybody at the table remotely cares or has the capacity to understand. Well, perhaps Serena does. She often seems preoccupied with pretentious prestige and intellectualism for its own sake, but her eyes are glassy and bored, and it’s unlikely she can hear him at all. He keeps using the words <em> new world symphony</em>, as if where they are living is not actually a dangerous tumble far back into the past.</p><p>Eden<em>—</em>the doe-eyed childbride from the sticks<em>—</em>and Nick both sit across from her, the latter of whom hasn’t glanced up from his plate at all and the former who won’t stop staring with those big blue eyes, taking in every minute movement at the table around her as if she’s never had family supper together in her life. Both of them make June sick to her stomach, but at least Rita’s roasted new potatoes are divine. It is rare that Offred is allowed butter and fat-roasted delicacies like this.</p><p>The Commander begins reciting something monotonous about how well the Gilead forces are doing in border areas, clearly to engage Nick in his manly duties. The drone of lies is enough to put a speedfreak to sleep, and any minute it seems as if Nick will land face down on his plate. In her periphery, June catches Serena swallowing heavily at the opposite end of the table, eyes locked on her husband, with something between disdain and annoyance pinching at their corners. The sound of Fred’s voice continues, and Eden appears rapt with his monologue, perhaps. It’s hard to tell.</p><p>Pretending just comes with such ease here.</p><p>Like how Serena is fingering her napkin, idly or anxiously, while acting as if the entire situation of dining with the help is completely typical for this household. It should be on her lap but it’s clenched in her left hand and she also will not make eye contact with June at all. Who’s terrible idea was this slow and grating punishment? </p><p>Serena’s, if June has to guess, since it seems like her brand of awkward power playing, but the only one enjoying himself now is the Commander.</p><p>Surely, there must be something to do to make it more worth the tension. There is so much to say, of course. A bevy of words that would spell disaster and chaos around them. Oh, wouldn’t The Commander love to hear what his dear wife’s been up to, or under, whenever he steps out of a room. Nick too, what’s he’s missed out on playing house like the dutiful foot-soldier of Gilead he is. Eden would simply be scandalized into mute trauma. That might actually be worth it, June considers. Not a word would ever be spread outside this room, she knows that enough, because Fred’s pride could never bear it to be known. His failings, his impotence, his lack of control.</p><p>God, it would be fucking great.</p><p>Instead, because everything here is more silence than sound, June bites down on a green bean, snapping it between her teeth. Still sharp, she notices with pleasure. Not everything has been dulled and made docile. It makes her think of the mark she left on the swell of Serena’s breast, not even a week ago. More so, she grins at the memory of Serena's scolding, half-hearted and coming from the mouth of a fully flustered Wife already helpless to her own desire. It was the least terrifying Serena Waterford had ever been.</p><p>Nobody is paying the lowly Handmaid any mind, so she stares, almost in defiance of prescribed table manners, unwaveringly at Serena as she chews. By the time she swallows, it’s obvious Serena is aware of the attention and making some effort to ignore it. As always.</p><p>For her next trick, June pushes a leg out under the table. There is no playing of coy Footsies here, not in her massive brown boots that are impossible to slip out of. Although, she does briefly consider stomping down on Serena’s delicately clad toes because her stupid teal pumps wouldn’t protect her at all. How wonderful the squeal could be. They’re seated close enough that it doesn’t take a lot to push against her foot with the toe.</p><p>Immediately, and obviously before she can catch herself, Serena’s eyes flash towards June. Cutting. Daggers, shiny and sharp. Rage and something else June can’t place flirt with the hard blue she finds locked onto her own stare.</p><p>For some reason, all June can hear is Serena chastising her gait, snarling about the heavy shuffle of the cumbersome boots on her recently polished hardwood floor in that obnoxious way she has about absolutely everything she says. Then the heavy thunk as they hit the floor of the blue bedroom, muffled only by a thin antique rug at the foot of Serena’s bed. (Maybe that’s the problem.)</p><p>There is no mistaking the rise of pinkish hue slowly creeping up Serena’s neck.</p><p>(Too much fun.)</p><p>There’s a lesson always to learn when provoking the lady of the house, and one that seems to be particularly difficult for June to actually retain. Moira would probably claim she has some hidden masochistic kink because of how obtuse she behaves in Serena’s presence, but there is something about the woman that makes it impossible to resist.</p><p>It could be said that women like Serena, these sorts of ambush predators, are akin to some type of large feline. A lioness. A tigress. A panther. Some graceful feline that stalks, patiently, waiting for the ideal moment to tear through long grasses into the open and pounce. Well, she has the finesse, the same fluid sinewy movements, the same ripples in her tense muscles as she moves quietly. But June thinks that’s really not right if you’ve spent more than five minutes with her.</p><p>Serena Joy Waterford is a great white shark, lurking in cold deep waters, sensing prey above, the helpless sort that don’t even have a chance to escape. She is a burst of speed, all lashing teeth and stunning force. There is no chase, only the kill.</p><p>Surely, this is what those rows of razor sharp fangs feel like when they tear a limb loose.</p><p>It’s as if she can’t breathe, all the blood rushing free from an open wound into the deep blue sea. Drowning. Some time during the few seconds she’d thought she’d got one over on Serena, those teal blue pumps had been slipped off, and June can’t decide if it’s entirely uncharacteristic or incredibly so that a nylon-clad foot has breached the edge of her boots and has slid up her calf.</p><p>It isn’t<em> fair. </em></p><p>Perhaps it would be comical the way June reaches for her crystal tumbler of milk and gulps it down like it’s ice water. Anything to distract herself from the fact that suddenly what was meant to be a petty game, some ridiculous attempt at a power play has been thrown on its head as there is a very distinctively feminine foot pressing up against her thigh, underneath the heavy red dress. The flush has faded from Serena’s neck and cheeks, her cool demeanor miraculously back in place and her attention it seems is elsewhere completely. She nods towards her husband, a tight smile on her lips. She looks like she’s swallowed her young whole. A great white indeed.</p><p>Goddamn her and her flexible long legs, June curses silently, unable to appease the gaping ache that is rumbling through her blood now as Serena manages to slide her toes, under, around, dipping precariously close to the building heat at the crux of her thighs. An inch or two is all it would take. Angle towards her more. Maybe a tiny tilt of her hips.</p><p>Maybe that is how to win this game.</p><p>Pretending to adjust her napkin across her lap, June grabs hold of the trespassing foot, subtly, never enough to be caught. There’s no fear of a tickle fight, not in this world. All the same, Serena startles a little at the contact because as much as they see-saw this way on a regular basis, there are still moments when she presumptuously doesn’t expect retaliation from such a weak and impertinent slug such as her Offred. </p><p>Serena fucking started this, and she is going to finish it, Fred, Nick and Eden as spectators or not. It's time for another notch on June’s bedpost as she moves enough, twists her lower body towards Serena, and yes, just an inch or two until Serena’s foot is effectively<em>—</em>if uncomfortably for her, wedged in the heat between June’s legs.</p><p>There is the slightest whiff of mischief around June now, her smug smile yearning to break past her lips as she watches Serena’s knuckles go white, gripping her silverware so tightly she may bend the metal. Momentarily, she plays with the thought of getting herself off on Serena’s foot, right there at the dinner table, wondering how much effort that would take. And, oh God, the revenge she could enact on prim and proper Mrs. Waterford is equally as enticing as the prospect of physical gratification which is grower nearer each second. Some rewards are so much better.</p><p>It’s a blessing that Eden is so naive still, so young and inexperienced, because when June finally looks away from the mess she’s making of a flushed and tense Serena, two big, innocent eyes are darting back and forth between the Handmaid and the Wife. A quirk of a furrowed brow, as if she’s not certain exactly what she’s witnessing or why. Blessed be. Fred is still rambling, Nick nodding along and grunting some sort of affirmation to appease the boss. Serena is going to spontaneously combust.</p><p>June knows. </p><p>She has seen it all before: the reddened cheeks, the hitch in her laboured breathing, the glaze over her eyes, the twitch in her fingers, that way she rolls her head a little as if working out a kink in the muscles. She’s tasted the salt that is definitely on Serena’s skin now, the thin sheen of sweat glistening there, and felt the hot puffs of breath, and knows exactly how slick her fingers would get if nobody else was in the room right now. </p><p>So, ignoring the inquisitive glances, June shifts her legs open wider, rolling her hips incrementally with perfect discretion, easing the pressure in her belly with the increase of friction. Maybe she should stop, reign in this game before it goes too far, but it feels good. (So fucking good.) It’s a deadly game to be playing at, grinding, practically fucking Serena’s foot of all the most absurd things in the universe.</p><p>A hard smack of Waterford crystal against the mahogany causes everyone at the table to startle in unison, everyone except Serena who is the cause of the sound, her hands gripping the glass far too tightly to be safe. In that same moment, June feels the cold rush of air under the table and the absence is noted, knowing somehow she will pay for this later. Vengeance is Serena Waterford's favorite hobby.</p><p>“Rita!” </p><p>At the beckoning shriek, Rita comes scurrying in, clearly expecting to be berated for something else she has had no fault in. But Serena holds up her half-finished plate, sneering.</p><p>"I'm no longer hungry. Clear it away now."</p><p>The Commander merely stares at his wife, almost with a hint of curiosity, although it could merely be bemusement. Within seconds, Serena is already out of the dining room, leaving baby Eden to stare after her in utter confusion, Nick to ignore it, and Fred to shrug.</p><p>June smirks, except she still can't tell if she won or lost that game.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. the study</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Perhaps it should come as a shock that it took this long at all. </p><p>A week of spending quiet nights squirrelled away in Fred’s study, secretly working on what are likely highly illegal and treasonous things is a long time to pretend as if the dirty thrill that came from shared conspiracy didn’t spill over to other criminal acts against God and Gilead. Especially when the opportunity was so blissfully presented. Their mutual willpower seemed to be at an all-time high, although the cerebral distraction of actual <em>work</em> appeared to be the main factor in the hiatus. How divine it was for two writers to be so deeply engrossed and occupied with the written word again.</p><p>The perfect cover, really.</p><p>Two days into it, Serena had grown tired of the silences punctuated with only the scratch of pens, the tip tap of her fingers on Fred’s keyboard, and the irritating sound of Offred slurping her milk or chewing on toast, or a croissant, or whatever leftovers Serena had commandeered for the evening. Abiding such constant aggravation was never in her repertoire.</p><p>Once upon a time, Serena would watch Fred cross the room, slip a vinyl from its sleeve and gently blow the dust away. His hands were so gentle with it, so patient as he laid the needle down, and so pleased with himself as the opening notes of some Wagner or Dvořák piece would echo off all the old wood. His head would bob, fingers twitch, sometimes even thump his foot just enough. He had never cared for CDs, and God forbid the mention of MP3s. Some men are very set in their ways, she supposed. He claimed the tone, the vibrancy, the depth of the sound of recorded music was unparalleled on anything but vinyl and the high end hi-fi systems he made such a show of. </p><p>She had flipped through his remaining collection, looking for her favorites and checking if indeed he had thrown them out. After all, what use was frivolous secular music to a Wife? Perhaps something remained of his love because she found a few, far at the back of his record drawer. She’d lingered far too long on the string quartets from Shostakovich, debating silently whether <em>No.10</em> was too much, too distracting, or just the right level of fury for their work together. Perhaps the more incisive <em>No.8</em> would do, but then, often her productivity was inflamed by the vigor of strings where many others found it too overwhelming to concentrate under such a musical deluge. Offred is one of those others, a different beast, so she had set those aside for another time, perhaps another universe.</p><p>For the following days, she played the others for Offred, although it was unlikely such an uncultured woman would even fully appreciate the emotional mastery of <em> Dichterliebe </em> or the immense imagination of Schumann’s fourth symphony, but she left the notes to linger long into their quiet work together. When, despite her better judgement and perhaps more spurred on by her own selfish desire to hear it at last, she slipped <em> No.8 </em> of the previously debated string quartet on, Offred nodded, as if she actually knew that one. She didn’t, obviously, because this was still <em> Offred</em>, but something tickled Serena’s chest with the Handmaid’s attempt to express her interest in her choices, and the attempt to show appreciation. </p><p>The next night, she dusts off her well-worn recording of Verdi's <em> Otello</em>, coaxing perhaps a change in temperature of their clandestine work meetings. There is no assenting nod for this one, and Serena scowls to herself at the implied rejection, whether purposeful or not, sneering that perhaps some Mozart or Puccini would be more to Offred’s pedestrian tastes. Of course, she doesn’t say it aloud. She says very little of what she thinks when it comes to Offred.</p><p>Instead, she glances too often at Offred, scribbling away, her thoughts spewing across pages of words like her own private symphony. Serena’s belly grows hotter at the thought, but she can’t pinpoint why. The next page she types purposely includes extra mistakes, terrible ones, just so she can watch June work some more. So she can watch her read. So she can hear the hiss of a red pen over paper, and just as forbidden as the creature that offered the temptation in the first place.</p><p>The night she plucks a Motown record from the small stack instead is when everything shifts. </p><p>It isn’t as if they haven’t touched before, haven’t caught a stare that lasted slightly too long, haven’t come heaving in waves against bedsheets. It all happens when Offred makes a snide comment, or maybe it is a compliment, as Serena can never be certain of her motives. They bicker, yet something hot and itchy is hunting underneath the surface of the words for more. It’s shocking that it has taken all week for this pleasant if platonic partnership to snap once again.</p><p>Serena Joy has never been so debauched, never fucked or been fucked on a desk, anybody’s desk, and definitely not her husband’s. Sex has also very much never had the soundtrack of The Commodores crooning harmony. (While that fact doesn’t put her off exactly—because nothing can seem to put her off June—she would prefer opera in all honesty. What an orgasm that could be, she muses.)</p><p>Spread wide like a sacrificial lamb on the altar, Serena gasps as Offred strips away her underwear, pushes up her blue dress, and trails her fingers up the inside of her trembling thighs. Security reports are forgotten in the chaotic mess of loose pages that now cover the antique rug. She can’t quite lean back<em>—</em>there are too many objects on this desk<em>—</em>but she lacks the will to argue about any of this, not when Offred’s fists tighten around her knees, yanking hard until Serena’s thighs press into the ornate edge of the oak desk.</p><p>Before she loses the chance, her own hands grasp and tug, pulling at the white bonnet that is so out of place here. And before she has the chance to whimper out any sort of plea, she loses sight of everything except the top of June’s blonde head. It is such a new sight to have anybody between her legs like this, that Serena has to swallow so heavily that she fears she may choke herself on the possibility—on the reality of this idle fantasy coming true. Of this sudden power to turn her virtue into pitch.</p><p>Something is very different. There is no cover of darkness, no shifting blankets, no shadows. While the black lurks in every corner of Fred’s office and the fireplace conjures demons on the walls, this moment is illuminated in a way Serena can’t find familiar. They’ve only been hidden, in the dark, and Offred has never before offered herself this particular way. Suddenly, here, she’s on full display to another woman who seems as hungry as ever despite her characteristically lethargic pace of trailing her mouth up one thigh.</p><p>It ends almost as soon as it begins, or perhaps it only feels like a flash in the pan. Bleeding the goat never took long in the holy books either. One minute Offred is there kneeling on the carpet, the next her tongue is hot and insistent against Serena’s flesh, against her swollen, hungry clit. And then, in a blink, Serena is shaking uncontrollably, embarrassed at her own desperation, and gripping helplessly at smooth wood as her entire body spasms against June’s mouth. She can’t tell which song is even playing anymore because all she hears is the rush of blood pounding in her ears, the waves crashing, breaking over and over, and distantly, the sound of a plate or cup hitting the floor with a crack as if it’s someone else’s dream.</p><p>Whether the words escape or not, she hears them all the same as her body sags against the hard and lust-slickened oak, her mind smothered and absent of reason. She prays, <em> Kill me tomorrow—let me live tonight</em>, as she struggles to look at June pulling back, desperate to make any sort of eye contact, any contact at all, really.</p><p>Falling back on her heels, June wipes her sleeve across her glistening mouth, then licks the remaining corners of her lips before finally looking at her handiwork. Her face is nothing if not smug, peering up from her spot on the floor. Something about that gaze is too intimate, too intimidating. With a brusque yank, Serena stands, adjusts her dress back into place, but her underwear remains in a guilty lump on the floor next to the Handmaid.</p><p>It is a very good thing that Serena doesn’t believe God pays much attention to the goings on within Fred’s study.</p><p>“It’s too bad women can’t work anymore,” Offred muses aloud glancing at the desk where Serena had just lain prone, the phantom of a smirk on her swollen pink lips. “It really becomes you.”</p><p>With everything she can harness within herself, Serena refrains from agreement. This women’s work really does suit Offred well too.</p>
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<a name="section0004"><h2>4. the wife's bedroom</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It’s often uncomfortable, except for the actual bed. </p><p>That’s pretty goddamn comfy, and June hates that it is. Sometimes, there’s a flicker of temptation to stay afterwards, to crawl under the blankets, burrow into the soft mattress, and just <em> sleep</em>. Maybe forever. And that’s precisely the reason she resists each and every time the opportunity arises. Suicide by falling sleep in your enemy’s bed seems too easy a way out, although it certainly would lend a certain Promethean flair to the punishment Serena would undoubtedly also experience. </p><p>How can you explain away a naked Handmaid in your bed in any pure and Godly way at all?</p><p>June prefers to not consider the rest of the room with its shades of blue and gray, shifting and looming, full of much more sinister memories. When she’s here, there is only one reason, and her focus remains intently on that alone.</p><p>She touches the velvety duvet, feels the high-thread count sheets slide against her bare skin. She squeezes her eyes shut when on her back against plush pillows because the ceiling has a life of its own in her mind. She can only see phantom images of Serena from that angle, practically staring up her nose, and everything in that mirage reminds her of Fred and her body numbing to all touch. The smell isn’t the same as Ceremony nights because there is no male around, no sweat from his pores, no stray waft of stale cigar smoke, no aftershave or cologne. It’s only Serena’s arousal, her own arousal. Their shared sweat and saliva and come. </p><p>If she opens her eyes on a lucky night, all she sees is blonde hair and plains of soft skin, blemished only by the pinkened scars from a leather belt. Except June usually doesn’t even look there because there isn’t much point. Serena keeps herself covered, mostly. Usually she’s merely shifting shades of teal and blue, or at best a white nightgown because everything is a rush, even in this room, any second could be a disaster. Maybe there is a crest of red, crumpled around her waist, because June occasionally can’t wait, and Serena is incorrigible and reckless in the right mood, as rare as it is. </p><p>They don’t kiss, not on the mouth. Some echoes of the Ceremony remain like a stain across Serena Joy’s pretty painted canvases. June tries to pretend it keeps the distance this way, but occasionally, a clinging heat flashes in her gut and all she wants is just a taste, of Serena’s lips, of herself on Serena’s tongue just to prove that it’s all real because it really, <em> really </em> shouldn’t be. This is only one warped version of the very same nightmare she’s been living for the past three years. Nothing has actually changed, except who calls the shots.</p><p>Here, right now, it’s June.</p><p>In Serena’s bedroom, it’s only ever June, especially since there are no Ceremonies with a pregnant Handmaid. Maybe that’s the silver lining here. Well, that and the oral sex, probably. And for someone as prim, proper, and vestal as Mrs. Waterford, her golden tongue has hidden talents beyond the spiteful tirades and moralistic lashings she usually embarks upon. </p><p>That is the only way June likes her: subdued and quiet, brow quilted in devoted concentration, mouth full, and so very vulnerable. </p><p>She glances down as always, because looking up at the ceiling is like staring into the abyss of trauma, looking to the side feels too much like avoidance, but looking down she gets to revel in the sight of a great woman brought to her knees, to her soft belly, capable of having her skull crushed in with a few strong thighs. June knows she could do it. Her legs are full of power still, the muscles fit from all the walking and healthy meals and there’s not much to a human head when it really comes down to it, all the soft spots around the temple, the fissures, the flimsy nature of a spine and the lack of rigor in the neck. Serena wouldn’t even see it coming, like she once saw in a medical documentary as the scientists twisted tiny mouse necks.</p><p>The murderous revenge fantasies never last as long as June would like though, because more often than not, within seconds, Serena’s tongue will seek that one specific spot, that ever-sensitive patch just right up against her clit and the foggy blanket of pleasure distracts her too much to consider much of anything other than the push of her hips into Serena’s eager mouth, chasing some sort of deliverance.</p><p>As June bites down on her lip until she tastes the tang of iron, her hands clench around bedsheets first, moving to play with her own breasts momentarily, then find themselves as always tangled in blonde locks, gripping tightly as if she’ll fall off the edge of the earth if she doesn’t hang on. The sound that comes from Serena each time that happens makes June wonder who really is in control because, in another life, that rumbling, satisfied purr alone could make June come undone on its own. </p><p>Why doesn’t she feel more helpless like this? Splayed, naked, across the same bed that had stolen so much of her hope. Is it the power, perhaps? The control she pretends to have here, that Serena allows her to have. Just for a few minutes. Two long, perfect fingers slip easily inside her without much warning, and remind June that it will always be Serena in control of everything, but her hips buck up all the same and her throat tightens. Too late. The moan is loud enough and everything freezes for one perilous second while June’s hands go limp with fear.</p><p>It’s over, for sure.</p><p>That’s a rule, or <em> maybe </em>it is a rule. They never really communicated anything specific, but the implication was there. If someone heard, surely, it’s The Wall.</p><p>A chilly breeze sweeps in between her legs and as she peers down over her own naked body and the pregnant swell, Serena is waiting, propped up on her elbows and a sour grimace on her lips. Maybe it would be some type of warning sign if her face wasn’t glistening and her skin flushed, eyes slightly glazed still. It’s hard to seem intimidating when covered in come and clearly aroused beyond sense. God, if June could just always keep Serena exactly like this, merciful and helpless, life would approach something resembling tolerable. For a little while, anyway. If she squints.</p><p>“Sorry,” June mumbles with nothing resembling remorse. In fact, there’s a lilt of blame there instead, as if it’s entirely Serena’s fault. And, it is, in a way. She has to dig in, needle Serena until the discomfort is palpable. “I couldn’t help it.” </p><p><em> It’s your fault, </em> she thinks, glaring at Serena as best as she can manage. <em> Everything is your fault</em>.</p><p>This entire world is her fault.</p><p>But it’s too late. Before June can reach for her, Serena has pulled away entirely, her punishment for June’s incontinence made very clear. The problem however, is that Serena Joy doesn’t get to make any decisions here: that’s another one of their unspoken rules. She can’t get out of this quite so easily.</p><p>“You started something,” June growls under her breath. “Finish it.”</p><p>It almost seems possible to actually see the crawling of Serena’s skin when she takes instruction from her Handmaid, that slow, creeping ripple of disgust prickling over her arms, across her shoulders, down her spine. The flash of anger, the shame, the knowledge that this is her most unholy penance, whether she likes it or not because in here, June makes all the decisions. </p><p>It covers up the truth that she really has no control at all. The pantomime continues, with Serena playing along, pretending as if she doesn’t hold all the cards in one hand and June’s fate in the other. It’s better this way because June needs the theatre in order to survive, to hang on just a little while longer—and Serena needs whatever respite this particular heresy affords her. Being pious is so overrated, such a deep trap for a woman at odds with her own God. There are much better places for her to kneel.</p><p>If she didn’t know better, June suspects Serena enjoys the pretense of lacking control and the way it gives her the excuse not to be quite as uptight, as if it’s June’s fault and not her own neglected and starving libido. She’s always more tolerable when she has somebody else to blame for her many shameful shortcomings.</p><p>For a moment, it seems as if Serena is going to break their unspoken rule, and it’s not really beyond her to only work in her own favor and screw June over in the process. That is even more of a familiar sight. She waits, her eyes taking on a more recognizable blue, her pupils returning to normal and the flush of her cheeks fading. All the signs of a woman cooling. The icicles have begun to grow along her limbs.</p><p>June however doesn’t react to that all too common occurrence. She remains immodest and spread-eagled on the bed, waiting, giving Serena all the quiet temptation she needs. June and shame became unacquainted as soon as the Aunts stripped her down physically and psychologically within her first days at the Red Center. </p><p>Try as she might, Serena is not and never has been a particularly good actress, because her gaze flits across the scene, more than once and obviously tries not to let her eyes linger where her mouth just was. She still swallows heavily.</p><p>Too easy.</p><p>June slips two fingers over her own pregnant stomach, trailing them slowly and watching how intently Serena is staring at the tiny movement, the tease with wide, unblinking eyes. Of course, it’s easy because as touch-starved as Serena is, how desperate she is to be stroked and held (of which June is now achingly aware of at the most inopportune times), she is equally hungry to grab, to make active contact instead of merely receiving. She is greediest for taste most of all.</p><p>Way, way too easy.</p><p>When she presses into her own folds, slipping against the wet of both her own arousal and some mixture of Serena’s saliva, her hips tilt a little, seeking more. At the same moment, Serena gasps, almost a whine, low and incredibly dangerous. </p><p><em> Finish it, or I will</em>, June thinks to herself. It is absolutely a dare, and she is ready to push Serena to the breaking point in this power struggle because this is June's domain now - that's the deal. She strokes herself, once, twice and has never seen Serena so ready to kill before, which in itself is rather shocking considering their relationship.</p><p>There will be bruises on her thighs come tomorrow from the heavy hands gripping them in place, as Serena dives below again and pushes June’s fingers out of the way with her face, hoggish and rude. </p><p>June has always known that Serena Joy Waterford never has half-finished anything and isn’t about to start now.</p>
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<a name="section0005"><h2>5. the commander's bedroom</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you for all the wonderful comments! I did not expect that at all! xxx</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Like a predator sensing when its prey has ventured out of the den, Serena knows when Offred is not where she is supposed to be. She’s always known, in fact. Each and every time. Whether or not she covered that knowledge in ardent, persuasive denial was another issue. Fred. Nick. Her little Handmaid buddies. Serena smells Offred’s misbehavior like blood in the water, from miles away. And just the same, when she catches the scent, she follows, frenzied and instinctually. Thirsting.</p><p>The house is abnormally quiet for an overcast, slightly dreary afternoon. The monotonous drizzle of not-quite rain normally keeps everyone indoors for lack of anything better to do. It’s chilly, it’s gray. Perfect weather for napping and knitting, two things Serena Joy loathes to her very soul, but participates in, again, for lack of anything better to do. Most things are that way now, including that strange pull in her blood towards the Handmaid and she is certain it is mutual boredom and inaccessibility to anything even remotely cerebral or pleasurable that lends itself to their shared attempts at distraction.</p><p>If she had a good book, she wonders if she would still find her face buried between Offred’s legs most nights. Likely not. The pages of worlds beyond this one, of ideas and emotions long repressed, of alternate realities, that is the true longing. Even those old-worn favorites with their dog-eared corners and cracked spines are fading into distant memory. She could point towards the leatherbound folios of Woolf and Milton, Tolstoy and Austen, Lewis and the Brontës, the playwrights, poets, and Greeks. They were all complemented by a plethora of conservative feminist tomes<em>—</em><em>testaments </em> to her cause by everyone from Venker to Sommers. </p><p>Certainly captivating and robust a library, if there were such things now. She once had bookcases entirely devoted to those considered classic and great. Upon being published herself, and taking a healthy dose of ego from those around her, hers was the only extremely modern addition to that collection.</p><p>She can see those shelves only in her memory now. No such escape remains, not even amongst the rows and rows of literature in the forbidden study of her husband’s. Save the Bible, his are non-fiction, full of God and politics, rules upon rules for the country they live in and stacks of ancient and modernist philosophy he does not subscribe to in practice. It is a war library. Not a literary museum for reverence of the written word. It is pretension on display.</p><p>The graying memories, the ones she feels slipping further away are those more private to her, such as the works she kept on a small shelf in her bedroom once. Her favorites. The books that she didn’t want just anybody to see because they may say a little too much about her, and Fred was too self-absorbed to ever give her corner a glance. In the haze of years long gone, she loses sight of Florence King’s reader: what does the cover even look like? <em> Dolly City </em> loses the highlighted passages and sticky-notes poking out from the pages she’d made over the course of many readings. She thinks of her French texts, <em> Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit </em> that made her cry and she never understood why. She can recall the character name of “SJ” and how eerie that had felt seeing it for the first time in <em> The Year of Needy Girls</em>, but fails when she tries to pull out the reason the book itself stood out to her once. The used copy of the most famous and pathetic Radclyffe Hall novel she’d shamefully hidden behind the much more appropriate <em> Maternal Desire </em> seems like it never existed at all, although she’s certain the latter would be found on some Commander’s bookshelf in some district even now. There too was a book she couldn’t stand<em>—</em><em>Indecent Theology—</em>that was full of indignant scribbles in her own hand throughout its pages, exposing an anger in her similar to that time she read the pedantically dour Faludi for a college course, but it sat there on her shelf as well, its title just as bothersome and perverted as its content.</p><p>What she wouldn’t give to have even that horrid book in her hands at the moment, but the potential stimulation of a routinely acerbic yet physically satisfactory encounter with perhaps the woman most likely to be named her nemesis is all that remains for Serena.</p><p>The scent of blood is in the water here and more of a threat, more of a temptation. She's hungry.</p><p>Today, despite the weather, Rita has just left for shopping. Or perhaps going to prayer, as Marthas are allowed to do. Fred is saving the world, one bearded, testosterone-soaked board meeting at a time, and Nick, always the dutiful driver. Such bosom pals. </p><p>Once, she was the person who stood alongside her husband, not Nick. Once, her husband stood alongside her. That was even more preferable: him in her shadow of her power and attention to her.</p><p>If only she had been a man, could be one still, here and now. To be granted the ability to look the world in the face and made for her use. To live <em> Orlando </em> in reverse, as it were, discontent to only write little notes and think only of men, and more importantly, unencumbered by the sex and its functions she holds most in most esteem in her own published treatise. Books would be hers to hold, cherish, and write. Ink to paper would no longer be relegated to drawings with a bevy of misinterpretation, but the precise words themselves. A thousand for every image.</p><p>With something akin to a sixth sense, she paces the corridor, unconcerned by the thumping of her feet in the empty house. They echo and rumble across the hardwood. Ominous and severe. It is hardly the gait of a hunter, mostly because she knows her prey will not run. This prey is too stupid to have fear at all, like those birds in the Galapagos that had never encountered a person and thus never knew the inherent malevolence of humanity overhanging them. </p><p>She finds Offred standing in Fred’s burgundy bedroom, her fingers tracing the spine of a book on his bedside table, yet another tedious binding of the art of military marketing. Her head tilts towards the sound of a door closing, but doesn’t acknowledge Serena otherwise.</p><p>The woman is not a book, but she’ll do for now.</p><p>“You should not be in here,” she states in a low voice, very aware of the hypocrisy.</p><p>Offred’s hair is down, strangely juxtaposed to the fitted and proper red Handmaid uniform, as if she can’t be bothered to maintain structure when there is no one else around, as if she believes Serena won’t be bothered by her lack of decorum. She isn’t wrong, exactly. That is why she’s closed the bedroom door in the first place.</p><p>With an almost careless flick—if Serena didn’t know her Handmaid better—Offred opens the book, skimming over the pages.<em> Reading</em>. How is she so enticing doing merely that? </p><p>It’s the insolence, probably. </p><p>Something about a brazen woman, insisting on her own pleasures—whatever form they may take, has been like catnip to her. She’d put it down to admiration once, the poise, the insistence that the world make space for her, whoever she was. It wasn’t quite as easy when it was one of the pinko liberal snowflakes whose politics misaligned in significant ways. But if anybody is her complete opposite in every single way, it’s the woman who stands before her now, fingering the edges of a page in Fred’s political manual.</p><p>She shrugs finally. “I know.” It’s that breathy lilt in her voice. It’s so coy and insulting.</p><p>There’s something in it that Serena wishes to tame, to own, to control. She wants what Fred has, in every single way.</p><p>So she lunges. She takes. Ruthlessly, staking her place and making certain that Offred knows it. Her mouth comes down hard against warm skin as her hand reaches out and brushes that stupid book away from Offred’s grasp and it lands on the floor with a thud.</p><p>No books now. </p><p> </p><p>Maybe Offred is thinking the same thing because she is panting, heaving, and grasping at any piece of loose fabric she can until Serena’s blue uniform is pushed down to her waist with bra discarded, and June is naked on top of Fred’s duvet. Maybe she wants Serena to lay claim too, right here in this bedroom, with the threat of Fred coming home a sort of sordid thrill. It shouldn’t turn her on, but it does, in some way, and June… June doesn’t flinch against the sheets as she takes the hands and fingers and mouth, all bombarding her soft skin, penetrating without mercy. There’s nobody home and Serena had no idea how loud June could be before this, as she's all moans and panting and whimpering now. A virtual symphony of desire with every thrust or nip.</p><p>She’s begging. Actually begging. A torrent of pleases, oh gods, and punctuating it all with Serena's name over and over, and Serena thinks this must be how Fred felt to be in such control. It makes her skin tingle.</p><p>“Harder, <em> please</em>,” June groans trapped between a whine and a command, her eyes clenched and hands wild, her nails slashing at Serena’s shoulders, the red welted trails burning already. It doesn’t matter because no one ever sees her naked skin other than Offred anymore. In fact, there is a filthy shiver up her spine at the eroticism of being marked in such a way, even here. It lingers too close to danger. What if Fred sees it? What if she forgets and wears a dress with its immodest back or neckline dipping just a little too far down and Naomi recognizes the scratches for what they are? </p><p>Maybe Serena Joy wants to get caught that way, in an air of whispers and enigmatic suspicions. Maybe she wants to evoke even more damage against herself and longs for Offred’s fingernails to slice across her shoulders, her chest, her body as a whole, her throat. To be bled out on her husband’s sheets. Maybe it all feels better than it should. </p><p>Yes, Serena can do harder. She can be cold too and punishing in her fervor. She is Fred now: reckless and selfish, chasing her own pleasure at the infliction of helplessness. She fucks June harder, more roughly than ever, her fingers pushing in, deeper, moving as June writhes under her. She is careless about the new life growing just inches away. Her mouth comes down, no longer gentle and careful, but takes a peaked pink nipple between her teeth and rakes her teeth roughly over the tip, sucks harder than necessary and revels in the shocked gasp and the way June’s entire body arches off the bed with a wail of pleasure.</p><p>She blocks out the consideration of what June is thinking about, because it is probably not her. She simply does not want to be aware of how many times her husband has done this to the Handmaid in this very place. They both have Fred on the mind, though perhaps in different ways.</p><p>The sound of it all, the wet slosh of her fingers, how sloppy and grotesque it could be if she were disposed to be offended by this sort of behavior as a Godly woman should be. The groaning, the pants, the cries, the mouths and limbs and hands all moving against each other, the <em> wet</em>, the utter intoxicating femaleness of everything. It is something of exclusivity to them alone. </p><p>She is not Fred as she takes Offred's lower lip between her teeth momentarily, almost mouth to mouth at last and Offred moans as their breaths mingle.</p><p>No.</p><p>Not here, and not like this. Offred does not move for her Commander the way she moves now, and that much is known, although never spoken. June does move for Serena this way.</p><p>“<em>More,</em> Serena.”</p><p>Just to remind her that she can never and will never be her husband, nor a man of any kind, June uses her name, gritted out between her teeth, desperately. Perhaps she isn’t thinking of Fred after all. Obliging her demand is increasingly easy, especially when June’s fingernails dig in deep, tattooing Serena’s arms with visions of the moon. It’s only then that Serena allows her own silence to break as she echoes the prurient urgency from deep in her chest, feeling June tightening around her, under her, sweat and arousal soaking the duvet under them. </p><p>She’s never allowed herself to be particularly vocal, nor felt any particular urge to be in bed. She also is aware she’s never quite had sex like this either, and that could be part of the issue. <em> This </em> she actually enjoys in a very different way.</p><p>When June moans <em> Fuck</em>, drawing out the word into a howl as Serena grinds her palm hard against her clit, she almost loses it and gives up right there. Powerful hips are bucking against her, seeking just that extra bit and Serena can tell by the tremble of the muscles that June is so close, dangerously so. She’s a wild animal caught in a Szymanowski piece, just as it breaches past the point of no return, and it’s the most beautiful sound Serena Joy has heard in her life.</p><p>The witnessing of June’s undoing has been a rather common occurrence in the past months, but this has an energy altogether different and worrisome, mostly because Serena can’t imagine it having to end anymore, the ferocious need pulsating in her own body, between her legs and in the vice around her lungs. The fact it will end brings something tangy<em>—</em>like rust or dread<em>—</em>into her blood and leadens her bones. That thought is pushed aside only as long as it takes for June to come: every muscle pulsing, flexing and relaxing, hot, wet and suffocating in its intensity. </p><p>And, oh, the <em> sound</em>.</p><p>Suddenly, she doesn’t want to be Fred anymore... and no book is <em>this</em> good.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. the sitting room</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>June finds Serena standing at the window, basking in the only sunlight afforded to the dreary green room. She has a cup of tea cradled between her hands and a sternly set grimace on her lips. Despite the cumbersome and heavy boots, apparently she doesn’t hear June coming, or perhaps she does and can’t be bothered to care. Normally, she’d turn, an eyebrow arched in question or a shake of her head at the audacity of anybody bothering her during her clearly very important philosophical musings.</p><p>This time, she says nothing, does nothing. June thinks she notices just the slightest twitch of acknowledgement, but it could also as easily be a trick of her imagination. Most things with Serena seem to be all in her head, including all hints of humanity. It’s very possible everything has been some imagined series of encounters made up as she lies paralyzed in her cold room, filtered through the web of fever dreaming and cruel hallucination.</p><p>If Mrs. Waterford isn’t going to acknowledge her existence, she can take her time here. Glancing around at the airless sitting room, she sighs. Nothing changes enough. Little things prickle and flutter around the edges, like an old photography slowly curling but otherwise, it’s the same nightmare. On the easel, a half-finished watercolor painting of a magpie in her nest with Serena’s palette and brushes abandoned on a table nearby, a thin crust of paint hardening on the bristles.</p><p><em> One for sorrow, two for mirth</em>.</p><p>She remembers her uncle reciting once the entire nursery rhyme. It stuck with her, somehow.</p><p>
  <em> Seven for the devil, his own self. </em>
</p><p>Here there is only a single bird. She raises her stare to Serena still standing at the window. Bird of sorrow, indeed. There was a song called that once. June can’t remember who sang it, if she’s honest but wouldn’t mind hearing it again now. Still statuesque, Mrs. Waterford remains unaffected, like her painting. Like the lifeless eggs in the nest.</p><p>Oddly, June thinks a lot about eggs these days, but not in the same way she used to, like when the brunch place would ask her how she likes her eggs done. Over medium, always. Rarely did anybody get that right but it was worth a shot. Now, she prefers poached, like she has been.</p><p>There’s a bittersweet sadness in every egg she sees in Gilead. She wonders about the chickens, about how they live, their cages, the amount of daylight (if any) they see, their singular purpose and the stolen chances. Suddenly, she doesn’t feel quite so removed from chickens. The eggs in Serena’s watercolor nest seem like a faded memory, a vision of the past like those old oil Renaissance pieces in now-defunct art museums. Now it’s all rows of wire cages in windowless factories while they call it “organic”. </p><p>(Yeah fucking right. It’s about as organic as the Ceremony making natural little Putnams and Waterfords.)</p><p>Maybe Serena’s thinking about the same thing as she stands there, squinting out the window through the thick grey film coating it. Chances are however that she isn’t thinking about much at all. Lately things have become quieter than usual, and it is nice in a sense because when there’s silence, there’s less likelihood of the notorious histrionics from the mistress of the house. The words lie docile, unweaponized for once. It’s a nice fucking break, if she’s honest. As much as stoking Serena’s ire has become something of an idle pastime, she can think of better things these days, and more enticing ways to pass long, boring hours locked in this haunted house.</p><p>June easily skins Mrs. Waterford’s words now, bares them to the cold reality of their strangled existence, and watches them dry and shrivel. It’s more than she ever thought she’d have.</p><p>All the same, once in a while, some distracting noise would be nice. Something other than the grandfather clock in the corner, plodding evenly through the minutes, over and over.</p><p>“Good morning, Mrs. Waterford.” Her voice is not exactly loud, but it is jarring. June steps closer, quietly looking over the half-done painting again.</p><p>“Offred.” The name isn’t quite a greeting. The clipped tone is mildly irritated as she sips from her steaming tea cup again. She sways, like the willow branches in her painting. It isn't much, but it is something a little new. </p><p>The teal on the magpie’s wing is the exact shade Serena is wearing. Perhaps that's on purpose but June can never be certain. What is the difference between Serena and the bird, really? Everyone thinks June is uncultured and dim, but she knows <em> La gazza ladra</em>. She remembers the defining drums, <em> A Clockwork Orange </em>… and she knows the myths and ill omen of the magpie. It is all very suitable for Serena—the thief of things shiny and new. Like children. </p><p>But there are no magpies in Boston. Whether they have gone extinct, or were never here to begin with, June cannot be sure. She’s not a goddamn biologist. She just remembers the ones with blue on their wings, from her vacation to Europe once, when she had just finished college. They’d been so pretty, while everyone there called them pests. Nuisance birds.</p><p>She remembers their songs too and longs for the noisy trees of Dublin city parks.</p><p>It is so fucking quiet here.</p><p>"Is there something you want?" </p><p>June startles at the harsh feel of Serena's impatient voice through the silence. It is an act of violence, almost. She thinks of the overture and those snare drums again, how the waves come and go, snapping at her heels. </p><p><em>Yes, Mrs. Waterford, I would like some goddamn noise in this crypt. How about you? </em>June has mostly given up on wishing for more important things like her daughter, and freedom, and a sense of hope. She relies now on the tiny things to make it through a single day at a time. She relies on Serena Joy’s stifled gasps in her ear, those fingers curled inside her, and the ephemeral bliss of never-long-enough endorphin rushes.</p><p>“No.” She shrugs and moves one step closer. “Not really.”</p><p>The household is currently full. Rita is doing laundry, Nick is washing the car, again, because he has nothing better to do. Nichole is asleep in her crib. The Commander is in his study and June could only hear the rumble of his raised voice shouting on the phone behind those heavy wooden doors as she sauntered by. Eden is in the kitchen, cutting carrots and onions into tiny geometric cubes at the kitchen table. She doesn’t have to do it like that, but there is something about this house that makes people obsessive over tiny details. It’s like it’s painted into the walls or something. Each day everyone inhales the same toxic fumes, living their stilted lives with a compulsive redundancy. </p><p>It would be very dangerous to create any sound.</p><p>Serena will not look away from the window, her bitter voice cracking along the corners of the room. “Find a way to make yourself useful, then.”</p><p>June is so sick and tired of being useful though. She wants to be frivolous and irresponsible. Two magpies are mirth, after all. </p><p>It should be amusing, maybe it is, how Serena startles still when June saunters closer to her instead of crawling away. By now, this dance should be far more familiar. "Useful" can be such a vague word in this house, especially for a Handmaid since the only purpose to her existence is the baby she could potentially carry again. How much more fucking useful can she be?</p><p>Even when June is standing right next to her at the window, Serena Joy doesn’t move away and out of view of anybody who could be in the garden. (And anybody <em> could </em>be in the garden: Nick, Eden, Rita.) It is a bold dare. There are long ornamental cedars that block the window from the street but it’s a risk that normally neither would take. Perhaps it’s the grimy haze on the window panes, maybe it’s sheer boredom but June is determined to be useful.</p><p>It’s a dangerous game.</p><p>Her fingers reach out, and she draws her hand slowly down Serena’s lower back. It is nothing more than a purposeful tease and with some satisfaction she watches how quickly it works. Serena places her mug down almost immediately on the windowsill and draws a whispered shuddering breath. There is nothing safe about this at all and June wants to know how far Serena is willing to go because she has nothing to lose, but Serena Joy has so much. It’s not as if she hasn’t kissed Nick right here in this room, been held in his arms, whispered words of desires. The wooden floors creak loudly and nobody’s shoes are quiet. She keeps assuring herself that this isn’t a deadly game to be playing in a full house.</p><p>“Your painting is really... nice,” June murmurs, and lingers her hand on the flare of Serena’s turquoise-clad hip. It could be in her imagination but she thinks she can feel Serena shiver.</p><p>Finally, there is a response. For a second, Serena turns to her, an eyebrow arched and a look of steely delight on her lips. She glances towards the entrance to the room, and then focuses once again on June’s face with a startling intensity. Her large hands grip onto the red cotton of June’s sweatshirt and push her up against the green wall beside the window. Just a few inches to the left and they would be on full display like one of those seedy neon brothels in Amsterdam. Everything they seem to do these days hovers precariously on the precipice of suicide.</p><p>June feels her breath pushed out with the force and the weight of Serena’s body pressed right up against her own. She gulps for air right before a thigh is pressed between her legs, and Serena’s lips are pressed to the shell of her ear, the one that still hurts from the new tag pierced through it. She doesn’t say anything, band all June can feel is the moist hot air slipping down her neck. God, Serena’s hands are everywhere somehow. Under her shirt, touching skin, on her breasts, around her jaw. The slight pressure against her increases, she recognizes, as Serena grinds herself against June’s leg.</p><p>It’s so unrefined. They’re like dogs in heat, vying for dominance, and nothing more. But dogs in heat don’t normally get hanged in the town square for humping in the living room.</p><p>For the first time, June realizes that Mrs. Waterford wants to get fucked. Right now. Nothing delicate or demure about this plea. It’s feverish. Usually it’s the other way around as Serena wants to do the fucking, wants to bury her fingers or her mouth in June’s cunt and very rarely is there a need for such reciprocation. But today is different somehow and she can’t fucking figure out what has changed. </p><p>Yesterday was no different. The same resentful stares and bitter tone of voice. Denying June access to her own daughter. There had been no kindness in her at all. There had not even been any interest in her at all. She was still punishing June for running away to have Holly—Nichole without her. Maybe that’s what this is then: a punishment. Instead of giving, she is going to take. Steal everything back.</p><p>That’s fine, June thinks, because Serena has yet to learn that this isn’t actual punishment at all, not her access to see Serena at her most helpless and out of control. June’s heard her real name slipped out of those evil lips, barely audible, in the throes of sex and that is a reward actually. But she’s not about to tell Serena that because she didn’t realize until about 5 seconds ago how much she very much wants to fuck her against the wall of her precious, ugly sitting room.</p><p>There is no time. Any minute there could be a thump of footsteps. Maybe that’s part of the punishment too. If they get caught, Serena can cry rape too, say it’s all against her will, have Offred sent to the Colonies once and for all. Honestly? June’s not entirely sure that isn’t the plan.</p><p>Then Serena’s hand is grasping the back of June’s neck, holding her still. Dammit, she wants to be kissed and held properly. Not like this. </p><p>But she takes it because it’s more than nothing, and it’s a more satisfying touch than Nick’s is now. (It’s the taste of power. It must be the power.)</p><p>A faint whimper tickles her eardrum and the tiny sound is incentive enough to switch up the game once more. She longs for that whine to morph into a scream. So, she shoves Serena back, much to the aghast look of shock on Serena’s face. It’s the little things that are the real treats in this world, and it’s amusing at least as anger begins to cloud her features with what could be seen as a refusal. It’s not, obviously but in those split seconds of confusion, Serena Joy is ready to get offended again, like always. That is, until she finds her and her blue dress thrown back against the very same wall, a resounding thump muffled by the drapes.</p><p>Mrs. Waterford is normally imposing in stature but like this, all limp and red-faced, it doesn’t matter how tall she is. Desperation has never been a hallmark of strength and confidence.</p><p>June reaches down, gathering the heavy skirt in her hands and pushing it up. Her fingers close around white underwear, yanking them down with force, so much force that Serena actually flinches. Immediately June’s nostril’s flare with the need in the air. She wants to look, wants to stand back, wants to study Serena with her underwear around her ankles like this as if she’s a specimen in a laboratory. Some strange, before undiscovered creature from a long lost past. Except there is no time for scientific perusals. She’ll have to settle for feeling instead.</p><p>Her fingers slide over the rise of a hip bone, the blue dress falling over her arm and effectively shadowing what is really happening. She cups Serena, not roughly but not gentle because she’s starving for touch too. There is a persistent heat radiating out, dampness beginning to coat her hand. It takes everything in her willpower not to place her mouth against Serena’s throat. She wants to taste, and suck, and bite, and make Serena moan out loud like she knows she can. Instead, she takes two fingers and slides them through slick folds out of sight, pressing her forehead against Serena’s neck, her pulse point bouncing against June’s temple. </p><p>Brushing her clit first, then circling, teasing her entrance without mercy, June grins through her own arousal as Serena begins twisting her hips, chasing June’s fingers. She slides inside Serena without any resistance and the gasp of rapture that comes from above her is striking. It’s as if Serena has just seen God. Maybe she has. Her head slams back against the wall, face raised to heaven but eyes shut to its brilliance.</p><p>Meanwhile, she feels entirely surrounded by blue. Like drowning in the middle of the ocean and nobody else is around to save her. </p><p>June would be lying if she claimed this isn’t exactly what she wants to be doing right now, reckless death wish or not. One of Serena’s hands is curled so tightly in her hair it almost hurts but the other one gets lost for a moment until there’s a shuffling of fabric, sloppy, uncoordinated and desperate. The air in the sitting room is cold against June’s legs and Serena doesn’t even bother to rip at her underclothes. A nimble hand shoves itself inside June’s own underwear.</p><p>The quiet whimper returns as Serena feels how ready June is as well. </p><p>Before she can catch her breath, June’s knees go weak and she sags against a sea of blue. It feels so fucking good that all her plans and all her thoughts get tangled in her mind. Serena really can’t help herself. Soon, the slight awkwardness of their different heights seems forgotten and the only thing that matters is the movement of their bodies, their fingers, the clenching and wet. Never. Never had June expected that this is what her usefulness would be. Never had she expected that she and Mrs. Waterford would be fucking each other breathless in the damn sitting room of all places. In the room where they first laid eyes on each other with barely contained resentment and hatred. </p><p>It’s way too insane.</p><p>(It has to be a nightmare.)</p><p>And that is when she finally feels Serena’s mouth on her own. Before it had only been teases and fleeting mistakes. But Serena swallows her now, pulling every last ounce of oxygen from her lungs until she swears her face is as blue as the magpie’s wing. Riding Serena’s hand makes her feel pathetic, and used, but there isn’t any other option. Not when she can create such a deliberate friction against her own clit, and not when Serena’s shamelessly doing the same.</p><p>God, they’re gross. </p><p>She’d wanted to kiss Serena for weeks but that had been off-limits, an instant mood killer. It’s too easy to slide up, cradle Serena’s head and anchor them together in this hazy green prison cell. She feels the relief of Serena letting go of her hair, and instead, her hand wraps around June’s wrist, for once not in an attempt to control. It’s entanglement.</p><p>Serena comes first, shuddering and clenching and thrusting, and all without warning. Her lips are bruising and June eats her cries. It doesn’t take much more for June to follow, working her body against Serena’s until that burst of relief finally floods her veins.</p><p>It takes a long minute for them to disentangle limbs and hands and clothing. What utterly irresponsible and mindless beasts lust turns them both into. June had considered her hospital corridor and household dalliances with Nick to be pushing the Gileadean threshold for rash behavior but this was altogether asinine. She adjusts her damp underwear again, still reeling a little with the forbidden knowledge and still tasting Serena’s lips like a summer peach. Her legs are actually trembling.</p><p> </p><p>The magpie still waits, legless near its nest, and June realizes once more how eerily silent the house is. There is no way they would not have been heard by someone, although she’s not certain who. Even the quietest cry would echo.</p><p>“You may go,” Serena intones, waving in the general direction of the doorway and picks up her stupid tea again. It’s cold. This is all a performance. Even so, it’s irritating and June presses her lips together to prevent her from talking back. Instead, she shuffles towards the easel, drifts her finger down the magpie’s back, then over its eggs, as Serena watches her like a flustered hawk. </p><p>Casually, June knocks the palette of watercolor paints off the table as she moves to leave the room. It’s petty but the clatter of brushes sounds a little bit like a drum roll.</p><p>She stares, and Serena glares back as she pushes a lock of loosened blonde hair behind her own ear. </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Maybe I should apologize for this chapter? I feel it is not the best one but I hope you like it anyway! Also I apologize in advance because I am rewriting the next chapter so it will take a while. (Sorry!)</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. the handmaid's room</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The bed is very uncomfortable.</p><p>It had been on purpose, in a sense. She had known precisely what a terrible mattress it was and how rickety the bed frame. It had been hers once as a child, in her parent’s lakehouse far too many years ago, and it definitely felt like it was better left in the ‘80s. Nothing but the worst for the Handmaids. She couldn’t abide them having any comfort at all when she’s so uneasy about it all. If she has to hold them while her husband fucks them, if she has to live with them, if she has to deal with their presence every day flaunting their fertility, if she has to sacrifice her pride, then the Handmaids can damnwell suffer too. All night, every night.</p><p>It feels fair and just, to her anyway.</p><p>Serena even chose the most worn and threadbare old sheets from her mother’s linen closet when Gilead came to be. Fred would likely call her petty and immature if he knew. She’d much prefer to be known as contemptible. It has more gravitas, more Machiavellian. She cannot be known as a woman with no style, after all, even if that rests on the darker end of the spectrum. She will settle for infamy if nothing else, that is what Fred had suggested she be all those years ago when she faced down bright-faced and dim-witted liberal university students and consistently outraged do-gooder types.</p><p>It’s only when her bare skin rubs against the same scratchy floral patterns she saw in her bedroom as a child and her muscles cry against the lumps and springs does she regret her decision. Because, after all, she cares little for anything unless it affects her personally and this acutely does now.</p><p>If she was to purchase or pilfer a new set of sheets now it would surely draw suspicion. She has to wait until Offred complains to Rita who will, in her calculatingly passive way, suggest a fresh set of linens. Only then will Serena have the freedom. But of course Offred will give no one the satisfaction of knowing she suffers any such discomfort at Serena’s puerile whims. She knows the score. It’s just the game they play now, and Serena insists she is the Mitsuko—not the naive Sonoko. And she suspects in her own mind, Offred believes likewise. Nobody wants to be Sonoko.</p><p>This had started as tantrums in the day and uninvited prayer under the cover of night, turned to wandering hands and resistant bedfellows, and at some point, Serena found herself lapping and sucking between the Handmaid’s thighs, intoxicated by the musk and taste. She was kneeling prostate to God's most perfect creation, not a woman. Once Offred had the baby, it still failed to stop, if anything she is more ardent now.</p><p>Serena insists—to herself, since nobody else has any interest in her motives—that it is because of the place, which isn’t so much as not one at all. A place between places, she surmises. Not quite where it should be, but also not… </p><p>She thinks about the isolation, the emptiness, the secrecy of the space but it is because of none of those things. There is nothing liminal about it. It does not defy definitions nor challenge the assumptions of such a place. It’s chilly, year round in the attic, dreary. Walls are dull in color. There is a smell common to closed up rooms, a musty stagnant scent. Life unmoving. The windows are accepting of the outside world, although the shutters are nailed down. To protect her, she said to Nick. To protect what’s inside from the scale of reality. There is always further to fall when perched so high above. </p><p>The crowns of the trees don’t reach the windows, yet the sun never quite enters the way it should, even on the best of days. A veil of yawning timeless asynchrony has fallen over it like the sound of thrumming percussion off-kilter yet not quite out of place. Per Nørgård, eat your heart out.</p><p>A place between places. They can meet here, out of sync with the rest of the world and safer in that namelessness. </p><p>Once Serena Joy was an unwelcome intruder in the room, bringing only violence and anger with her. Her bitterness towards Offred leaked into every crack and crevice of that damp, quiet cell. She scrubbed at the floorboards with her lips on Offred’s inner thigh, her fingers entwined in blonde hair, her sweat on the sheets. She lathered the soap with the press of naked breasts against her own, with slickness on her leg, with the heaving chest and stuttered breaths. She washed it all off with the pulling of sighs and whispered pleas from June’s throat. The scum never quite came clean all the same.</p><p>The first time Serena comes, with June’s mouth on her neck and two fingers curled inside her, is when she realizes this place and her body is both here and beyond. Elsewhere. And despite the imprecise feel, there is nothing discordant, nothing disharmonious about it. Merely a reflection of the atonality of their very existence. She wishes always at those moments for her old music, the “noise” Fred threw away long ago. </p><p>Nothing else speaks to her the same way. June, in this bedroom, this way, and Berg become one and the same. She imagines his violin concertos—from <em>Adante</em> to <em>Adagio</em>—as her lips glide over the landscape of skin, as June sings deep in her chest, as her fingers pluck and hold, delicate but strong. Unrestrained, full of a raw emotionality that simply fails to come into existence in any other form because its very essence denies form altogether. There is something alike with the mirage of compositional freedom, yet abiding still the rules of dodecaphony. The same here: the indefinition of the place allows Serena to glance at the illusion of liberty, but underneath still lies discretion. </p><p>She wonders what it’s like to die in quicksand, and if this is anything like that. </p><p>June presses tongue through Serena’s swollen folds and she’s quite certain there’s a reckoning happening within the shifting shadows. Her breath hisses in. There’s a jerk of her hips, against her best efforts not to respond with such desire or allow June to sense the truth. The concept of sinking into nothingness is hardly new in Gilead, especially in this household these days, and the slow suffocating weight is so familiar that she barely registers it anymore—except when she is released.</p><p>Like the surge of heat up her chest, it boils close to the surface finally.</p><p>The pressure and the rhythm, the ebb and flow. Her hands slide down, over her own inflamed skin and further until she bumps against June’s fingers, wrapped tightly around either thigh. They itch and burn. All she wants is to entwine them with her own but she settles for stroking, encouragement. There is a wildness in the Handmaid when she is here, in the attic, her flushed pink skin reflecting what little moonlight is available. Any moment it seems she’s going to sprout fur, long fangs, and claws. The howl is caught in her throat every night. The way she eats is like a starving animal, caged too long and removed of gentleness. </p><p>Except right now. With the touch of hands, June lessens her frenzy, relaxes the intensity, and falls back. Not too far.</p><p>Her tongue sweeps up just once before Serena can feel the deep inhale. “I forgot you liked it like this.” Her whole body seems to soften and slow, more like the Offred that Serena sees normally. That snail-like creature that lethargically slips around the household, sliming in her wake and so quiet. June doesn’t sound apologetic in the least, just wistful. It's not kindness that inspires her change in fervor. Serena knows it's all about power and which is the most effective way to wield it against each other. </p><p>Despite the loss, Serena doesn’t complain as June pulls herself up the bed, its springs creaking in a dissonant, otherworldly song not even she can appreciate. But the body on hers is heavy, warm, malleable and easy, and smooth. It fits hers. So unlike a man. She hates Offred all over again suddenly for this betrayal and trickery. She is nothing if not a master of disguise and the hapless groan of her blood for more than this is sickening.</p><p>She wants to vomit. How easy it would be to shove Offred away, toss her to the wooden floor with a thud and never step foot in this sordid bedroom again. She has done such things and made such promises in the past. That violence is nothing when compared to the death happening here.</p><p>Too late, she thinks. Too late.</p><p>Because June’s mouth is against hers finally, pressing lips and all Serena can taste is herself, sweetly salty and earthy in a way that erodes her bones down to their most primeval elements. It’s June’s tongue against her own, two primitive yet distinct scents in her nostrils, mingling them together. There is a clench inbetween her own legs, longing coming down heavily on her body. She whimpers, pathetic and grotesque, with the touch of June’s hardened nipples pushing against her own until she loses the memory of breath. Gulping in, choking, she bites down, something to cut herself loose from the rhythm that is attempting to pull her under.</p><p>Then it’s just the taste of her own lingering juices, June, and rust. Neither stops. Not when one of Serena’s hands latches onto a handful of blonde hair and tugs, maybe too hard, and not when her other one slips between their bodies, gently kneading and running her thumb purposefully over a sensitive nipple. June winces but makes no sound this time, because the household is not empty even if the room below is only the nursery. Instead, the body above her keens, arcs against and then away, in some new tousled refrain. The comfortable soft weight in her hand, the way June silently begs for more and how she knows June’s weakness for this particular type of attention, it's her own power over the situation. Chapped from nursing Nichole or not, June bites down on her own injured lip, squeezing her eyes closed in pleasure, until Serena releases her again.</p><p>Everything about this hangs on the edge. It is never enough, and yet too much. Never certain of what it is at all. Perhaps because the life beyond these floral bed-sheets and past that wooden door is less secure than ever. Perhaps even because the boundaries between their bodies have blurred, the fabric of their lives is frayed now with all of this because no longer is red bad and blue good, nor vice versa. The colors mix. Things remain, as always, complicated and barely reconciled into this reality.</p><p>But more so now, when June slides her fingers against Serena’s mound, dipping, lightly teasing her clit, stroking carefully instead of with force because they still both remember how in one moment of unhinged humiliation and truth between gasps of breath, Serena had admitted she prefers it <em> softer </em> actually. The frenzied rutting animals only last for so long before the season of heat passes. She wonders now if June feels rich like a god when she sees what a creature slave has been made here.</p><p>June pauses, hesitating suddenly.</p><p>Maybe it’s because she senses the snivelling malignant type of romance in Serena Joy Waterford, and that is the most horrifying of all her leaked secrets so far. But does it matter in this place, where nothing is defined as it should be? </p><p>Chromatic scales fill her ears for only a moment, then fade abruptly as June moves inside her and around her and through her, because now there is no more need for synesthesic transposition of one thing into another, even in her deepest mind. Every sense exists simply as it is, in the attic on a terrible mattress lingering between worlds. 

All that is left are shades of violet. </p>
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<a name="section0008"><h2>8. the greenhouse</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Once more, I would like to thank you all so very much for the beautiful and kind words for this story. I treasure them! I am very happy I could give something back to this fans and pairing! This has been a great experience so thank you everyone again. :)</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Humid, hidden, sheltered. Neither too soft nor too hard. Now that the levy has broken and that final rule has snapped, they often kiss for hours here.</p><p>And it has been <em> hours</em>, or it feels that way, at any rate. Even in the broad daylight. Surely Rita or Fred is bound to wonder where they’ve both wandered off to. Well, Serena Joy is often left to her own devices, passing time idly between here, the sitting room, and Naomi Putnam’s grandiose mansion. But now, it’s been hours of getting pressed up against damp wooden tables and misty windows with Serena’s mouth against hers, hotter than the air inside, hotter than the relentless winter sun beating down into the miniature jungle she’s designed to shelter her from the remainder of the apocalypse.</p><p>Nobody dares venture out to the greenhouse anymore, not even the Commander. There’s something far more sacred these days about it, sacrosanct even as Serena often wanders and potters aimlessly in nothing more than her nightgown and robe. As if she can't care any longer about anything. In the time since Canada, Fred knows he’s more than unwelcome and, in a fragile truce, Serena’s agreed to never step into his study without invitation thusly requiring the same of the greenhouse. In essence, this tiny, muggy, fragile box of paradise is all she has left to call her own.</p><p>So, for hours, it’s been just like this.</p><p>Serena’s lips have been so many places: neck, clavicle, ear, lips, hands, wrist, nape. Some sort of intimate journey of tease with no relief. And she won’t stop, not that June has considered asking for it to cease. Not at all. If anything, the attention is addictive, leaving her wanting more with each passing minute and she hates it. Her blood pulses in her ears but she resents it even so. She can't breathe occasionally, it being pulled from her own lungs as Serena claims it for herself, just like everything else. Maybe it's something like revenge, or hatred that is the real reason her body grinds up against Serena's. Except she cannot decide who is being punished more, which in itself seems to be becoming more and more frequent.</p><p>At first this was all forbidden: mouth to mouth, lips to lips, that <em>plunging</em> tongue, hot and wet, that makes June's knees knock merely imagining the other parts of her body that tongue has been, just the same. It hadn’t been a verbal agreement, simply something they had both avoided for so long. Maybe it was the shadow of intimacy, but probably more so it was the betrayal of such incredible need, bordering on the pitiful and desperate. Many things could belay desire, like fingers and heaving chests and reddened cheeks, but nothing quite so acutely as the gasp of breath stolen from one into another. With a kiss, it was impossible to deny the <em> want</em>, and denial had been such a cornerstone of them for so long. She can no longer remember who first broke the truce except now all she craves is to be swallowed whole.</p><p>There are some risks that are still too much, and one of those is the ability to strip naked and be ravished in her Garden of Eden. June knows as much, and accepts it, but doesn’t necessarily like it.</p><p>Right now, her lips are so swollen and her skin so flushed that it wouldn’t matter if she’s naked or not. If someone were to interrupt, the evidence would be clear. Serena, too, slick with sweat, her blonde hair loose and clinging wetly to her brow as her chest heaves with the sheer resistance to having more than this. This clandestine phantom of a fuck in a humid, glass-walled cage. This denial, this temptation. </p><p><em> Take a bite out of me</em>, June wants to growl. <em> Do it</em>. Her fingers slither and curl around Serena’s jaw, her arms, her hair, her shoulders, her waist. Oh God, her waist, June thinks, knowing how easy it would be to shift the loose nightgown up, slide her hand up a bare thigh and settle it against the smoothness of Serena’s curves. How easy it would be to slide it lower, dipping in.</p><p>Know God.</p><p>
  <em> Fall. </em>
</p><p>She’d never considered herself both the apple and the snake before, but this woollen red dress is too uncomfortable in this oppressive heat, scratching and poking into her inflamed skin with no option for relief. </p><p><em> For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God</em>.</p><p>More than anything, June wants to feel God somewhere in this fucking place because she’s not sure it’s possible anywhere else. </p><p>“Serena,” she tries, hoarsely choking on the words in the brief interlude between kisses. Her lips are so sore by now, bruised like ripe fruit and she’s so damn thirsty for more. </p><p>There is a glaze over Serena’s icy blue eyes when she pauses, focusing intently on the Handmaid for the first time, without moving. Her hands hesitate, one still gripping June’s waist over the red fabric, terrified almost, the other tangled in blonde hair. Their hips are pressed together and the ache of the wooden edge is starting to dig into June’s thighs, but Serena has her own leg pressed so tightly into that other aching spot that June can’t help herself at the moment: she rolls her hips, seeking, <em> chasing </em> the friction she needs. If she must grind herself to pleasure against a hard thigh, fully clothed, like some high-schooler dry humping at their first rager, so be it. Nobody ever claimed June Osborne was a classy woman.</p><p>(Every room in this household seems to feel like yet another prison cell. <em>Please let me out</em>, she pleads to nobody at all. Nobody ever listens.)</p><p>She spreads her legs, just that little bit more but the one who gasps is Serena, suddenly impatient.</p><p>It hurts when she finds herself pulled away from the table and pushed up against the foggy glass, on the one side that only views a large wooden fence. The moisture drips down her neck, soaks the back of her dress and Serena doesn’t stop. Her mouth is demanding more now, and there’s a light-headed sort of ecstasy that begins to overtake rational thought. </p><p>It’s temptation, the snake says. It’s the silent voice of a chaotic, remorseless God.</p><p>June’s hands are free to roam wherever they wish this time but she can’t breathe, not when Serena is kissing her so hard, sucking up all the air in the room, pulsing her body insistently against her like a wave breaking into the sand, over and over and over. The world spins a little but she cups a breast anyway, running her thumb over the hard peak and eliciting the type of wanton, desperate sound from Serena that rips all her common sense away. She feels the slight warmth of her own arousal on the inside of her thigh at the mere memory of Serena's moans. It comes with more tangible things like the ghost of fingers thrusting hard and deft, of a tongue insistently pushing her to the edge, the slick skin on her own. But it's all just a vague remembrance of something from an old dream. Her body thrums with a pulsating need to have that pressure, that friction, that escape from such a stagnant reality. </p><p><em>Fuck me</em>, she longs to scream and dig her hands into Serena's soft flesh. She no longer cares who can hear it.</p><p>Because, if they don’t fuck now, what even is the point of any of this?</p><p>Her head tilts back as Serena moves her lips once more over her neck, her exposed collarbone, her ear, nipping just enough as to not leave a mark but evoke fire in the belly all the same. The true skill of a closeted woman. It has been hours—it <em>must</em> have been, she curses—and they’re still right here, tossing the forbidden fruit back and forth, neither willing to take the first bite. Some stupid game of hot potato. June cannot allow Serena to know exactly how hungry she has made her.</p><p><em> You will not certainly die, the serpent said</em>.</p><p>But it may feel that way.</p><p>What purpose is a fallen woman if not to move freely, with no fear of retribution from God any longer? The worst has already happened. So, June does move without timidity as she grabs hold of light blue-covered arms and pulls, determined until she has switched places. No, she doesn’t think Serena truly wants to come, not here, not yet, but what Serena wants somehow pales in comparison to what June needs by now.</p><p>Maybe there is some argument to convince Serena of what should happen next, who should sink their teeth into the flesh first. But oftentimes, it seems better to just take action, any action. Very little in Gilead has been accomplished with patience. </p><p>It's so easy to shove Serena against the glass wall and to hold her body there because, after all, the spirit indeed is willing, and the flesh is weak. A pot clatters to the hard ground, spilling freshly cut white roses all over the floor. June crushes one under her boot as she moves, and the satisfaction of the feeling almost gives her the pleasure she seeks. She longs to stomp on all of them, tear the rest up by their fucking roots and destroy the garden entirely if only to have this unholy experience again.</p><p>There's a grunt of protest but June knows by now when Serena means it and when she's merely playing her favorite role of petulant defiance. It's easier still to grab one delicate wrist, clench onto it tightly, and direct it where she wants it. Trapped against the wall, Serena doesn't squirm, she doesn't fight, she only breathes shallower, on the verge of hyperventilating maybe and June can feel the tendons stretch and tense as her fingers itch to move even before they land. Momentarily, June wants to bury her face between Serena's thighs right here, taste her undeniable weakness, feel them quiver and quake, and deny Serena what she seems to want most: the illusion of control.</p><p>Instead, she gives in as usual, because as much as the sly games are a thrill for her ego, her body itself is begging for more corporeal attention. Dank arousal sits so, so heavy in her abdomen, like some sort of wild animal clawing its way out of a curse. Serena Joy has the most satisfying fingers June has ever seen, or felt. Long, graceful, adept and determined. (And an even better tongue.)</p><p>Hiking up the cumbersome red dress, June maneuvers Serena's free hand to the edge of her ugly white underclothes. Forgetting who is meant to be in charge, Serena yanks hard on the hair between her fingers, pulling June roughly into another kiss. This one actually hurts. It's hard and insistent and absolutely fucking relentless. There are teeth, and bruises, and blood, perhaps. With that, the last hour no longer seems intimate and almost beautiful. More so, it's a purgatorial game, maybe. An exercise in being the most restrained and sanctimonious Wife possible, dragging out the in-between moments of the act, always hanging precariously onto the <em>almost</em> of it all.</p><p>Yet Serena knows her way around these standard issue Handmaid briefs better than any Wife, and June would definitely put money on that, if gambling weren't illegal too. </p><p>"You're soaking," comes the mewling, pathetic whine that escapes between sloppy and sloppier kisses. And, if June had any capacity to focus on anything other than the way her hips unconsciously angle towards nimble fingers, she might even laugh at the sound of a completely broken Serena Waterford. The glass creaks at her back.</p><p>“Then do <em> something</em>,” June snarls, impatient and uninterested in Serena’s attempts to stall any longer and aching to be taken. Enough dancing around the forbidden tree in this treacherous facsimile of a garden and this is all they have left.</p><p>Eat the goddamn fruit already.</p><p>It’s ripe.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you for reading my first publicly-posted fanfic ever. I don't know what I'm doing! Please be kind. :)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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